“People think I am lucky because I am alive. But I feel very lonely without my family. My parents and three sisters died in an air raid”. (Abu Bakr, 17 years old, Yemen)
The stories of Abu Bakr (17 years old), Akram (15 years old) and Wedad (7 years old) are very powerful: they are three of the many kids of Yemen who lost their dear families or close friends in the last three years of war. Yemen’s Skies of Terror – the 360 video documentary that won 2018 Online Journalism Awards for Excellence in Immersive Storytelling – tells the stories of Abu Bakr, Akram and Wedad.
Once you start watching the 5-minute 360-degree video, you want the stories to stop, you want the war to stop, because even for you, a viewer behind a computer, the suffer is too much. You discover the current lives of Akram, Abu Bakr and Wedad, you step in their neighborhoods, in their houses, and you get hit by the pain, by the ruins, by death, by people praying for a normal life and by the kids’ words:
“I do not know if the world is aware what is going on here in Yemen. I wish the world could hear us, and stop the killing that is happening in my home, Yemen” (Abu Bakr)
And then you use the 360 tool, and try to reach for the sky. When one’s eyes look for the sky it is in search of hope, peace, or it is for praying to God. But not in Yemen. In three years of war, over 16,600 air raids took place: “More than 10,000 people have been killed. With at least 1,600 schools damaged or destroyed in the attacks, more than four million Yemeni children have been unable to attend school” (Yemen’s skies of terror, Al Jazeera). In Yemen, the sky brings death and fear.
Yemen’s Skies of Terror: Three Years of War in Yemen was filmed, using small 360-degree cameras, by two local journalists, Ahmad Algohbary, based in Sana’a, the capital, and Manal Qaed Alwesabi, based in the port city of Hodeidah, for Al Jazeera.